^^^Nope, he doesn't have a point. He said "Nobody cared about swimming until Phelps came around", and that is expressly not true. The swimming competitions have been the MOST popular events in the summer Olympics for those same 2+ decades that you mentioned. He doesn't know who Mark Spitz is, so what? That doesn't make his statement true.

My statement was a relatively true hyperbole. Compared to the Olympics 4 years before Phelps, a great number more people (maybe only Americans?) were watching the swimming events the Olympics after Phelps. It is "expressly not true" that "nobody cared about swimming". I could have put Spitz in there, it wouldn't have made my statement any more or less true.

I just thought it was more illustrative than "Phelps winning increased swimming's popularity." Are you actually saying that is false? Because if that statement is not false, I had a point. I just did not make it in the least interesting and ambiguous way possible.